June 4

Like The Path it is a very narrative game. But this time the story is inspired by real world politics and romance, even though the setting is a fictional Latin American country in 1972. You play Angela Burnes, a US citizen who ends up working as a housekeeper in the penthouse of the wealthy Gabriel Ortega in the capital of San Bavón. As you go about your business washing dishes and ironing shirts, a revolution breaks out in the city below. Slowly but surely you get entangled in a web of revolutionary intrigue and, possibly, romance as the Anchurian people rise up against the notorious generalísimo Ricardo Miraflores.

February 16

As of now, you can pre-order our new game Sunset from the game's web page: http://tale-of-tales.com/Sunset. Pre-ordering gives you a Steam key on launch day, at a discount, and also a non-DRM version of the game for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Plus you are helping the creative team get through the last stretch of development. Thanks!

About This Game

There is one rule in the game. And it needs to be broken.
There is one goal. And when you attain it, you die. Six sisters live in an apartment in the city. One by one their mother sends them on an errand to their grandmother, who is sick and bedridden. The teenagers are instructed to go to grandmother's house deep in the forest and, by all means, to stay on the path! Wolves are hiding in the woods, just waiting for little girls to stray.
But young women are not exactly known for their obedience, are they? Will they be able to resist the temptations of the forest? Will they stay clear of danger? Can they prevent the ancient tale from being retold?
The Path is a game about growing, about changing, about making choices, about accepting the consequences of these choices. A game about playing, and failing, about embracing life, perhaps by accepting death.

Key Features:
The Path is a short horror game inspired by older versions of Little Red Riding hood, set in modern day. The Path offers an atmospheric experience of exploration, discovery and introspection through a unique form of gameplay, designed to immerse you deeply into its dark themes. Every interaction in the game expresses an aspect of the narrative. The six protagonists each have their own age and personality and allow the player to live through the tale in different ways. Most of the story, however, relies on your active imagination.
The Path is designed with accessibility in mind. There are no ticking clocks or monsters to defeat. No hard puzzles will ever halt your progress. Most activities in the game are entirely optional and voluntary. The player has all the freedom in the world to explore and experience.

While The Path does not contain any graphic violence or sexuality, it does allude to these themes. The overall melancholy mood of the game and the potentially unsettling course of events, make The Path unsuitable for children. Despite of its origins in fairy tales, The Path is decidedly a game for the mature mind.
The game features a complete realtime 3D environment that can be explored through third person navigation. The characters in this virtual world, including the player's avatars, are governed by a form of artificial intelligence that gives them some autonomy. As a result, nobody knows exactly what you will encounter on your journeys.
Next to the multi-layered stylized graphics, The Path features a continuous soundtrack composed by goth rock diva Jarboe (ex-Swans). In fact, there are hardly any sound effects in the game. Instead the music is continuously changing according to what is happening in the game. Like the behaviours of the characters, the music too is never exactly the same twice.
For a satisfying experience, it takes about 6 hours to complete the game.

As a piece of art, the Path delivers: emotive, curious, thought-provoking.

A unique storytelling experience that relies as much on the narrative on-screen as that which the player formulates.

I initially played the Path elsewhere for free and was impressed enough with the developer's vision to make a paid purchase. While there is enough content to justify the pricetag (currently $10), I strongly recommend playing the demo first, as those who enjoy this type of experience may be in the minority.

The Path is a walking simulator and adventure/horror game, where the horror mostly is implied.You take on the role of one of six sisters, each representing a different stage of womanhood, from little girl who only wants to play to a grown-up woman with adult wants.Each girl enters a path through the forest, at the other end of which is grandmother's house. Walk there, and the game for that girl ends.

Of course, that's not where the real gameplay is. Instead, go into the forest. A strange girl clad in white tries to guide you further away from the path, and strange white distortion on the edge of your screen guides your character to other spots. You can pick up flowers along the way (which do nothing but increase a counter -- really, you don't get a thing for picking them all up) and also find strange items. Some of these can be interacted with, many cannot as they are meant for another sister.Each item you can interact with gets added to the basket.

Eventually you will find the Wolf. The Wolf takes on a form which is meaningful to the sister you're playing as, and leads her to her death. These deaths range from the obvious (little girl gets eaten) to the vaguely implied (talent agent destroys her? Woodsman rapes her?) -- a lot of this is left to interpretation.

After each wolf encounter the girl is back on the path, but the only way to go is move forward -- slowly, limping -- to grandmother's house. If you picked up the right items along the way the house becomes a kind of horror slideshow with distorted graphics and sounds reminiscent of what you found in the forest...

It is a strange and unique game definitely worth playing. Just don't think you'll fully understand all of it.

Also of note is that the game's demo is actually a fully separate "level", where you play as the Girl in White in a very different form of the forest. Fortunately it can be installed even if you own The Path.

I'm really not a big fan of Tale of Tales, having played previous games like The Graveyard and that game with the deer, and now The Path. It's not because of their not-so-subtle pretentiousness, such as how when talking about the development of Sunset (their latest game, which I haven't played), they stated "Abandoning some of our more extreme artistic ambitions actually made work easier and more enjoyable. And that’s when we should have realized that we were on the wrong path. Because whatever we enjoy is never, ever, what the gaming masses enjoy." It's not because after Sunset became a commercial failure and they left the gaming industry, they proceeded to write a series of passive-aggressive statements on various mediums blaming Sunset's failure on the gaming community's inability to "get" it, along with a tweet that goes, and I quote, "Hahaha. I'm so free. Look at me. I can say ♥♥♥♥ GAMES! ♥♥♥♥ GAMERS! ♥♥♥♥ THE GAME INDUSTRY! DIE! DIE!DIE! And rot in hell!" It's not because in Michaël Samyn's Patreon, he has a $5,000 tier listed "Shut me up", claiming that "if you really want me to disappear from videogames altogether, stop writing about them but also stop trying to make them, basically get the f out of your precious hobby, all it takes is a bit of cash. Make my day!". Tale of Tales is a pretentious blowhard of a developer, and while any developer leaving the industry is a bad thing, I can't say I'll miss them. But none of those are the reason why.

The reason I don't like Tale of Tales because they don't seem to have a clear grasp on what gaming is as an artistic medium. None of their games are good in the tratitional sense, and instead they bank on their artistic value. The problem is, their games never seem to actually acknowledge the strengths of the medium. Video games are a unique artistic medium because they allow the player to interact with the story and characters in ways that no other medium can easily do, and that allows them to give unique, involving, and emotional experiences that you can't get in other mediums. Tale of Tales games are more like paintings made into video games; they're pretty to look at, and maybe you can find a meaning if you look hard enough, but there's very little to actually see or do in them, and they don't really engage the player any more than going to an art museum would. Rather than being "games as art", these games are more like "art as games", and while I'm sure some people will appreciate them, they just aren't very fun to play at all, and I'm not so sure that they even wanted them to be fun. The Path is a game where you pick one of six girls and walk around a forest (or stay on the path, but you're pretty clearly not supposed to considering 98% of what little game there is is off the path), stopping occasionally to look at things, and that's basically it. You get to Grandma's house, and then you start over with another girl. It has a great atmosphere, and the forest environments are pretty to look at for the time it was released, but that's about as far as the game goes as far as what I can compliment.

This is my favourite game. It's slow and there is no "action" at all, it's more like an interactive story, but I always find it fascinating and have done since it came out when I was about 15. Five years later and I still think it's beautiful and kind of sad. But you have to go into it knowing that it's less like a game and more like a story. I view it as being all about the loss of innocence and how we lose it in different ways, some of the endings seem simple and suburban, but some suggest horrible, traumatic things happen. While I understand how people can't get into it or don't like it, to me it's beautiful.

VERY slow-paced (and I usually don't like most fast games), makes no sense, not immersing. Instructions are a mess.

People compared it to David Lynch's movie in some review. I love his movies because they make sense somewhere, when you look hard enough. This is pure Dadaism and not enjoyable in any sense. I'm pretty sure people rate this up because they're used to mainstream stuff and are amazed because "it's so artsy!". But it's not. It's dumb.

Just beautiful graphics, and that's it. I'd watch a video with this theme, but it's terrible to "play", if you can call it that,

The game said I found a wolf, but I didn't.

Argh. No. NO! NOOOO! Don't trust the trailers! Watch an uncut gameplay video to make sure you're up to the tedious task.